You decide how easy or challenging this craft will be, and how long it will take. All you need are some old magazines, construction paper, and glue and you can make these fun Valentine hearts!

What You Need:

poster board

construction paper

old magazines or catalogs

scissors

glue stick

Note: poster board can be replaced with construction paper, but construction paper is not as sturdy and will not hold up as well.

What You Do:

Base
Cut a piece of poster board to the size you want to work with, we used a square foot piece (12" x 12"). Draw a heart near the center of your poster board. To get a perfect heart, fold a piece of paper in half lengthwise, then cut out half of a heart OR print this. Unfold and you have a complete heart shape, trim if needed. Trace around your pattern with pencil onto the poster board. Draw 4 lines from the edge of the heart extended outward to the edge of the posterboard to divide the background into sections.

Prep
Tear out magazine or catalog pages that have mostly color and not much text, laundry and cereal ads are usually great for this! Tear pages into small squares by tearing into strips first, then into small pieces from the strips. Keep colors separated. We used goldenrod, green, blue, and pink for the background, and red for the heart.

Gluing
Begin with background colors first. Using the glue stick, apply squares in a tile fashion (next to one another) in one of the quartered sections of the background. Complete the color. Do this for each section until background is complete. Remember, the beauty of this project is that perfection is not required! Once the background colors are in place, fill in your heart with red squares.

Framing
To make the frame, cut four 1"-wide strips of construction paper in your choice of colors. We duplicated our background colors and set them in contrast with the background. For example, we started with a green frame strip on the left side because the green mosaic tiles were on the right side, and so on. Glue in place and over lap at each corner as shown in photo.

For the Younger Set
For younger children, it is not necessary, and not recommended, to tear pieces so small. Allow the children to tear pieces in whatever fashion they choose (lengths, clumps, blobs, etc.) and let them at it! The larger pieces are much easier to manipulate for smaller fingers. Take a look at Figure 2, designed completely by my 6 year old daughter, Kristen. Larger pieces are also better for the younger crowd because their attention spans are limited. The project involving small squares took approximately 45 minutes for an adult.